Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.

Slackware 2.0 was my first distribution, but which users outside OSNews type of users, get to use it on the desktop?

Well I used it long before I was an OSNews regular, so...

I get what you're saying though.

When Pat decides to stop doing it, Slackware will die, it is that simple.

I don't know about that. I have no insight into the inner workings of Pat's mind, of course, but I would like to think that he has a plan for core contributors like Eric and Robby to take over in his absence. It has a large enough user base to continue thriving, though I don't doubt there would be changes. A lot of the way the distro works is a reflection of Pat's personality and philosophy. I think that's one reason the distro tends to mesh very well with certain people and confuse the hell out of others.

I think there's definitely an age barrier too; most of the people in my tech circles who have even heard of Slackware are over 30 years old. That's not to say that all younger people are clueless about old distros, but those of us in our 30s and older grew up in the same era as Pat and probably had similar experiences with computers. Slackware was not the first GNU/Linux I ever tried, but it was the first one I could get to work properly on my hardware, and that was due to how it just kind of made sense to me. I came up with DOS, CP/M and the TRS-80 so I wasn't afraid of the command line.